


returns

by skuls



Series: Half-Light Universe [6]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Half-light universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2016-03-30
Packaged: 2018-05-30 02:45:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6405601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/skuls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As silly as it sounded, Samantha hadn't expected him to be any older.</p>
            </blockquote>





	returns

**Author's Note:**

> this story is based around samantha after her return in half-light, and my answer to my own question of "how would samantha react to stuff, such as scully and william". this is about as close as i will ever come to a full blown sequel to "half-light". half-light should definitely be read first, since this deals with events post-half light, but the other story(s) in this series don't really pertain to this particular story.
> 
> this was a long winded procrastination of my other story i'm writing in this universe, which is gonna be a lot longer. i'm probably doing too much. someone stop me. 
> 
> also: you better believe it killed me to call them "fox" and "dana".

As silly as it sounded, Samantha hadn't expected him to be any older. Instinctively, she'd known that years and years had passed. What little she remembers from her captivity is snapshots from different periods in her life. She'd known he would be older - God, he would be in his 40s by this point, if the date was correct. But until she'd seen him in the doorway, she'd been picturing the older brother who'd teased her and fought with her over the TV and tried to save her. A twelve year old boy. When he’d appeared in the doorway, she hadn’t recognized him until she saw his eyes. His eyes were the same.

“I wasn’t sure,” he’d said to her hoarsely, as he held her hand by the bed. “I’ve been fooled before, and I wasn’t sure. But it’s you, it’s really you.” Later, she’ll ask what he meant by that, and he’d avoid answering. Whatever he’d meant, the memories it brought up weren’t happy.

Fox sits beside her bed and talks to her in a low voice that contrasts the way that he always yelled when they were kids. There is a familiar untempered excitement about him. He'd lifted a hand and the light flashed off of the gold around his finger. He's married. Of course. His life hadn't been frozen in time. “You’re married,” she’d said.

He’d smiled briefly like he still couldn’t believe it, and then his expression contorted into guilt. Hand-in-the-cookie-jar, I-swear-I-didn’t-cheat, no-Samantha-I-haven’t-seen-your-doll look. “And I have a son,” he said quietly.

He brings his family on his third visit. His wife is the redheaded doctor she'd seen before in the childrens’ section of the hospital, all kind smiles and comforting aura. She is introduced as “Scully”, and she immediately adds in a, “ _Dana_ Scully” with a rueful smile. His son is all Fox in his childhood years, messy hair and lanky limbs. Fox introduces him as William, and Samantha feels a pang as she thinks, _oh. After Dad._

William goes to shake her hand. As soon as their palms brush, she hears the echo of his voice in her brain. _So. You can do it, too?_

She tries to be subtle in her reply, keeping a neutral face, but she answers back quietly. _Yeah, I can do it, too._

  
  


The Scully family is a loud one, full of inside jokes and family arguments that wash out holiday meals. The Mulders were never ones for boisterous family gatherings, but Fox fits right in like a puzzle piece. He's changed a lot since she knew him. He goes almost exclusively by their last name now, which is jarring to hear, since his friends were the only ones to ever call him that when they were kids. He calls Dana by her last name, too. She wonders if it’s a familial thing.

Fox had invited her several times before she'd agreed. It's better than the loneliness of her apartment, but not by much. She sort of fades into the background, which is fine by her. She sits on the couch, halfway hidden by the Christmas tree, and lets the environment sink it.

 _Aunt Samantha?_ William ducks around the tree and comes to sit beside her. _Are you okay?_

She nods and offers her nephew a small smile. They have formed a bond, mostly through their unspoken telepathic communication. William is sweet, his mother’s eyes sending out unspoken encouragements. He’s sweet in the way Fox was, but he is more open about it, while her brother hid it behind his demands that she leave him alone and tugs on her braid.

  
  


“I just wanted you to know,” Dana tells her. Her hand is where it normally is these days, pressed against her extended abdomen. Fox had been so excited to give her the news, months ago, that Samantha didn’t have the heart to tell him that William had let it slip in one of their telepathic conversations. “I understand if you don’t believe me.”

“No, I believe you,” Samantha assures her. It’s a bit farfetched, and a little hard to take in, but it’s not unbelievable. Not after what happened before.

Dana smiles a little and leans back in her chair. “I can tell that you and Mulder are related,” she says.

She rubs the skin under her eyes, wiping away tears that aren’t there. “So… I was dead? In this other realm?”

“Yes. But you were never really gone, at least not to Mulder. He still thought about you and kept your picture in his office. You still influenced a lot of the decisions that he made. He never forgot you, even when we came back here. He only stopped looking because we hadn’t found anything, and he thought it was the best decision.”

“I understand,” Samantha assures her. “I do. It’s just… disorienting, I guess. Hell or not, the idea of your own death is just…”

“I know.” Dana pats her hand comfortingly. Her entire presence gives off comfort, something it seemed like was lacking from their childhood. She can see why her brother loves this woman so much. “Mulder told me I was dead on his second visit to this other place. When we came back, we saw that most of our family that we thought was dead was alive again. It’s definitely disorienting. But I’m still very glad that we got this other chance. At… life, really.”

“I never thought he forgot about me,” she lies. She had, at first. She wonders which version of events she prefers - the one where her brother chased after her for years and lost their parents, his partner, his son to this, or the one where he moved on and built a life for himself. The selfish part of her wishes he hadn’t given up. _Do you know why they gave me up?_ she wants to tell Dana. _It was your son. Because he used his abilities to save you and Fox, to keep them from hurting anyone in his family ever again. And I’m his family._

 

“What was Dad like as a kid?” William asks her. He likes to visit, and she enjoys the company. It’s hard to interact with people after years of fading in and out of consciousness, coma, with little human interaction, so she doesn’t go out a lot.

“He was a good brother,” she relays.

William inclines an eyebrow, Dana-style. She gives these looks to Fox often and generously. Samantha enjoys the fact that he has a wife who gives him hell when he’s off on one of his tangents.

“He was a little mean,” she says honestly. “But not cruel. He would distract me when Mom and Dad fought. He would comfort me if I had a nightmare.” She doesn’t know how well William knows the Mulders, but she guesses he can decipher that they weren’t a Norman Rockwell family. And from what Fox has said, it wasn’t much better after she was taken.

William nods. A shiver runs up her spine, and his voice is in her head again, whispering. _He always used to talk about you a lot. He told so many stories. When I was a kid-_ and here he ducks his head with embarrassment, and Samantha thinks, _you’re still a kid, even though you’ve fought people off with the depths of your mind, you’re still a kid._

 _Whatever,_ he retorts. She’d forgotten he could hear her. _When I was younger, I would want him to stop cause I was tired of hearing the same old stories._

Samantha watches her nephew trace the markings in the coffee table with his index finger. She’d retrieved it from her mother. It’d been in her room as a kid. She’d come in one day to find him carving his name in the top with one of their dad’s pocket knives. _Fox Mulder._ She’d thrown a stuffed dog at him and shouted at him to get out. She likes having this relic of her childhood in her apartment. It makes the years feel less.

“He was a good brother,” she says again.

  


They sit on the lawn that they had played tag on when they were kids, where Fox had taught her to climb a tree, where he had skinned his knee and dripped blood stubbornly while he limped around the yard for an hour before going in to get a Band-Aid. Once, when he’d studied astronomy in school, he’d asked her to come wait outside with him while he finished his star map. He’d claimed it was so he could have a lookout in case someone - or something - snuck up on them, but Samantha suspected that he didn’t want to be out there alone. He’d never done well with loneliness.

Dana and William are down on the beach, half-asleep in front of a clumsily built fire, their dog nestled between them. Samantha had been surprised when William had to pull the animal off of her as soon as she entered their house for the first time. “I thought you hated dogs,” she’d said to Fox.

He’d shrugged helplessly. “I was desperately outnumbered and outvoted.”

The stars spread above them, vast and endless. Samantha points up at a star. “I was up there,” she says, sounding like a child again. “Right up there.”

“But you came back,” Fox reminds her, and her brother’s voice anchors her back to Earth. “You came back.”


End file.
